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Green coffee beans roast in a revolving white machine on the kitchen counter. Annie Proulx, one of America’s greatest living writers, is upstairs in the shower. She looked startled when she opened the front door and found me there. She was wearing her dressing gown.

An idea for a story had kept her awake for most of the night, and then she had overslept. I wait in the kitchen, and wonder about the transition she has had to make. For nearly 20 years she lived by herself in remote areas of Wyoming, where the landscape and population density resemble those of Outer Mongolia.

I used to visit her there occasionally. Proulx is a tough, flinty, unusual character, and she loved the stark windswept high plains and long horizons, the birds and wildlife, the hard-bitten local characters, the rawness of it all. She immortalised Wyoming in three superb collections of short stories.

Proulx in 1996, the year she published her third novel, Accordion CrimesCredit:
Getty

One of those stories, ‘Brokeback Mountain’, a ballad of two gay cowboys, became a big Oscar-winning film in 2005, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Now, at the age of 80, Proulx lives on the outskirts of a traffic-clogged commuter town in the hills outside Seattle.

She has an attractive property framed by cedar trees, with a greenhouse, a vegetable garden and a view of the Cascade mountains. The house is built of local spruce, with big airy rooms and early-morning light coming through the picture windows. The furniture is plain, modern and elegant. Her beloved books and paintings are nicely arranged.

I don’t know Proulx well, but I hope she’s happy here. She comes down the stairs in an orange shirt with a dark-blue sweater, her short sensible hair still damp from the shower. Watching her grind the beans, make the coffee and carry it upstairs to her office, while describing maps of wind patterns on the Atlantic coast, she seems remarkably sharp, lively and robust for her age.

But once we sit down and start drinking the delicious brew, it becomes apparent that she’s not doing well, and that moving here has been a disastrous mistake. ‘It’s a place dominated by red cedar, twisty roads and too many vehicles,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t suit me. I have got to get out of here.’

Living with severe allergies

Living anywhere involves compromise, I suggest, and she cuts me off. ‘I turn out to be highly allergic to almost everything here,’ she says. ‘The red cedars, which I find to be beautiful, interesting and marvellous trees, are no good for me. Loggers who cut them are prone to something called red-cedar asthma. These trees have a very bad effect on some people, and I’m one of them.’

Now I can hear a slight wheezy rasp in her breathing, but that’s just a small part of what she’s been going through. ‘I’ve become very sensitised to many kinds of food, drink, medicines, anaesthetics, etcetera, etcetera,’ she says. ‘I went to culinary school to learn how to cook good food. Now I live on oatmeal and chicken. I haven’t been able to drink a glass of wine for 18 months.’

Like many older women, I have discovered the absolute luxury of living alone

There’s a small grim irony here, and being a master technician of ironies in her writing, she is acutely aware of it. She has just spent 10 years researching and writing an epic novel about trees, loggers, timber companies and the phenomenal deforestation of our planet over the last three centuries.

The book is called Barkskins, and it tells the story of two multi-generational families whose destiny is bound up in trees. It is the most ambitious thing she has ever written, and it’s being hailed as the crowning masterpiece of her award-studded career.

In the course of writing it, she moved from the treeless Wyoming plains to these lush, forested hills. To someone fascinated to the point of obsession by trees, the tall handsome red cedars were one of the main attractions. Now they’re forcing her to move again, which is the last thing she feels like doing.

With Jake Gyllenhaal at the premiere of Brokeback Mountain in 2005Credit:
Getty

‘I can’t go back to Wyoming,’ she says. ‘It got to be too much. It’s difficult struggling with a ranch gate when you’re an old lady and the wind is howling. And it was such a long drive to go anywhere: 200 miles to pick up things or go to a doctor’s appointment.’

A very private family life

What about nearby Seattle, where one of her sons lives, and the red-cedar presence is minimal? ‘No way,’ she says. ‘I like to visit cities, but I couldn’t live in one. I’ll probably go back to New England. That was my original habitat, and it will probably be OK for me again.’

Proulx doesn’t like to talk about her personal life, and sharply deflects enquiries about her three marriages and four children. When I ask how long she has lived by herself, however, she responds enthusiastically. ‘Like many older women, I have discovered the absolute luxury of living alone, and being master of one’s time – important if you are a writer.

It’s a place dominated by red cedar, twisty roads and too many vehicles. It doesn’t suit me. I have got to get out of here

'Freed from the tyranny of table and closet, there is time to observe and think. If one longs for company, there are friends and relatives. Nothing and no one could persuade me to give up voluntary solitude.’ Her love of seclusion also stems from an overcrowded childhood.

Early years and family life

She was the eldest of five girls, in a huge extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles. Her father was a French Canadian who moved to New England. He started out in a textile mill as a bobbin boy, aged 14, and rose to company vice president. Her mother had a New England lineage going back to 1635, and was one of nine children. ‘Her siblings populated the Earth,’ says Proulx.

A hallmark of her fiction, along with prodigious research and sharp black humour, is her eye for the small telling detail. It’s obvious that she feasts her eyes on the world, especially the natural world, and notices everything. She credits this to early training by her mother.

The plains of Wyoming were home
to Proulx for 20 years, and inspired her writing. Credit:
gallerystock

‘She was a painter and an amateur naturalist who showed all of us the worlds of ants, swamp grass, birds of prey. She took us on expeditions into sand dunes and forests, always pointed out the undersides of leaves, so to speak.’ Her mother would also make up stories about the individual ants they watched, giving the insects names and human characteristics.

This might have influenced her oldest daughter too. Proulx wrote her first short story when she was 10, while in bed with chicken pox. She remembers nothing else about it. She kept writing stories in her teens and early 20s, and sold them occasionally to Seventeen, If and other magazines.

But writing was a sideline. She was going to be a history professor. She completed two degrees, then balked at the finish line of her PhD thesis, unable to face a life of institutional politics and faculty dinner parties. ‘I don’t play well with others,’ she explains.

Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore in The Shipping News (2001)Credit:
Rex features

Then came a long, long stretch of poverty, hard work, failed marriages, and motherhood. She raised three sons by herself in Vermont. She worked in restaurants and the post office, and published a village newspaper. She kept working on her short stories, but to put food on the table she wrote how-to magazine articles about canoeing, mice, building a house, growing chillies, and a hundred other practical things.

Beginnings of an epic career

Her first published books were about cider-making, fence-building, grape-growing and gourmet-vegetable gardening. She was a keen bird hunter and fly fisherwoman, so she started submitting articles to hunting and fishing magazines.

She used the name EA Proulx because it was easier to get the stories accepted if the editors assumed she was a man. The most extraordinary thing about her literary career is how late it began. She published her first collection of short fiction, Heart Songs, in 1988, at the age of 53.

Curiosity is what drives me, I am interested in everything, and all the people I know and like have fierce passions for places and things

The contract included a blank space for another book described only as ‘novel’, so she wrote one called Postcards about a New England farm family confronting a changing economy. The main protagonist was named Loyal Blood, and he now seems almost a prototype. She specialises in male characters in tough circumstances, and many of them are oddly named: Ribeye Cluke, Leetil Bewd, Beaufield Nutbeem, and so on.

Success, awards and a Pulitzer

Postcards won glowing reviews and the prestigious PEN/Faulkner award. Then she wrote The Shipping News, a huge international bestseller about a small Newfoundland town and its hapless newspaperman, Quoyle. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and was later made into a film with Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore and Judi Dench.

Now Proulx was free to write whatever she wanted and to live as she pleased. That meant dividing her time between remote, storm-lashed, icy-cold Newfoundland and the windswept plains of Wyoming, which bake in the summer and can freeze down to -40C in winter. She loves nature at its most powerful and elemental.

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal
in the film adaptation
of Brokeback Mountain (2005), which won
three OscarsCredit:
Rex features

Two more novels followed. Accordion Crimes (1996) traces the passage of an accordion through generations of immigrant families in New York and New Orleans. That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) was about hog farms and windmills in the Texas Panhandle. It drained her energies so much that she swore off novels, and stuck to writing her short stories about Wyoming.

When I first met her in 2002, she was living in the tiny hamlet of Centennial, chopping her own wood, cutting her own hair and cooking elaborate and wonderful meals for visitors. Photographers, artists, musicians, biologists and other scientists would show up at her table.

‘Curiosity is what drives me,’ she says. ‘I am interested in everything, and all the people I know and like have fierce passions for places and things. I never thought it was peculiar or abnormal to be this way when I was younger, but I’ve learnt differently. Most people are remarkably incurious.’

Barkskins is 736 pages long, and it would have been far longer if her editor hadn’t staged an intervention

From Centennial, she went to an even more remote place – a 640-acre ranch on a river. She named it Bird Cloud, because the first time she saw it a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the sky. In a beautiful memoir called Bird Cloud (2011) she described the experience of learning this wild new place, and designing and building a house there to reflect her interests and appetites.

Proulx's love of literature

Perhaps no one in the world loves books more passionately than Annie Proulx, so the centrepiece of the house was a library with 5,000 books on the shelves, and long worktables covered in maps, manuscripts and research materials. Bedrooms and a kitchen were attached. There was also a Japanese soak tub, orchards and gardens, and solar panels for electricity.

Bird Cloud was a wrenching place to leave. ‘One of the great tragedies of my life was that I had to dispose of so many books,’ she says with a quaver in her voice. Her eyes brim with tears, then there’s a long silent pause as she recollects herself. ‘I’m bereft of half my books,’ she says.

‘I keep looking for them. I miss them terribly. I wonder where they are and how they’re doing. And, damn it, I start buying back the books, knowing I have to move again. I dread packing up and moving again. It does not get easier with old age.’

Her capacity for writing, on the other hand, is completely undiminished. Barkskins is 736 pages long, and it would have been far longer if her editor hadn’t staged an intervention. ‘I loved writing this book,’ she says. ‘I would have carried on till page 2,000.’ The origin of the book lies in a road trip she took 30 years ago, before she had published her first novel.

‘I would drive across the country a lot in those days, just to see it, and I found myself one day in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,’ she says. ‘After many miles of driving on wonderful empty roads, I came into this non-place, a crossroads with some shrubby little trees and a sign that said, ‘In this place grew the finest white-pine forest in the world.’

The makings of a masterpiece

She drove around, and found not a single white-pine tree. A slow-germinating seed was planted that day, she now realises, and it flowered three decades later in Barkskins. After seeing that sign in Michigan, she started reading and collecting books about trees, forestry and the timber business. Fifty of them are on the shelves behind me in her office.

When she decided to write something based on all this curiosity-driven research, she wanted it to be factual, ‘a nice didactic boring thing of some length’. Then she decided that a novel would have more readership, which meant inventing characters, plots and subplots.

‘That’s the easy part,’ she says. ‘The characters just tumble out, and are very quick and easy to write. It’s the background, the description of the actual work in the forest, that’s the hard part. To get it right in every single detail.’

The novel opens with two penniless French-men arriving in the immense primordial forests of north-east Canada, or New France, in 1697. They become indentured woodcutters, or barkskins, for a feudal seigneur. René Sel, decent, hard-working and abused by his master, is forced into marriage with a native Mi’kmaw woman, and they slowly grow to love each other.

Question of culture

Their children and descendants are caught between two worlds, the modern and the tribal, and cutting down the once-sacred forest is one of the very few occupations available to them. ‘People know that there were vast forests blanketing much of the world, and that these forests have largely been removed, but we think of this extraordinary destruction as inevitable,’ says Proulx.

‘It’s the same with the absorption of original cultures, and the destruction of the parts that don’t fit the conqueror’s view. It gets glanced over as inevitable in many, many books. But it’s huge, appalling and strange, and needs to be thought about.’

I cannot bear the signings, interviews, book tours and all the PR stuff. I’m a solitary person, and I hate it. No more! From now on, my stories are just for me

The other penniless Frenchman, Charles Duquet, is cunning, cold-hearted and ruthlessly ambitious. He escapes his servitude and becomes a fur trader. Then he founds a timber company that enriches his descendants and razes forests all over the world.

The book is written in taut, tense, vivid prose, and the action moves from the muddy wilderness of Quebec to boardrooms in cobblestoned Boston, from the great Michigan white-pine forest to Amsterdam and China, and the majestic kauri forests of New Zealand.

Humanity’s insatiable hunger for timber is the engine that drives the book, and it goes hand in hand with the belief that forests are a limitless resource that can never be destroyed. Only in the last few chapters, set in the present day, does it become clear to a few characters that there is a heavy price to pay for our missing forests.

Proulx has read and absorbed much of the vast scientific literature on climate change, species die-offs, pollution and the likelihood of ecological collapse, all of which are deeply connected to deforestation. Does she feel gloomy and despondent about the future of the world? ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m curious. It’s certainly going to be devastating, but pretty damn interesting. I’m just sorry I won’t be around to see how it plays out.’

At the end of the interview, she makes a rather shocking announcement. Barkskins will mark the end of her relationship with the publishing world and the reading public.

‘I’ll keep on writing, because I truly love it, but I cannot bear the signings, interviews, book tours and all the PR stuff,’ she says. ‘I’m a solitary person, and I hate it. I really, really hate it. No more! From now on, my stories are just for me. When I finish them, I’ll just put them away.’

‘That’s a shame for your readers,’ I say. ‘They’ll get over it,’ she says sharply. ‘I’ve written enough.’

Barkskins by Annie Proulx (4th Estate, £18.99) will be published next week. To order your copy for £16.99 plus £1.99 p&p, call 0844-871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk